News

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has recently launched its Help Great Britain Work Well campaign, a new health and safety system strategy.

The key points of the strategy are that Great Britain has a health and safety record to be proud of and that everyone involved in the system should play their part.

The campaign is built around six priority themes: 

• Acting together - promoting broader ownership of health and safety
• Tackling ill health - highlighting and tackling the costs associated with workplace ill health
• Managing risk well - making risk management easier
• Supporting small employers - giving smaller companies simple advice
• Keeping pace with change - anticipating and tackling new health and safety challenges
• Sharing success - promoting the benefits of the country's world class health and safety system

Managing Risk Well

Dame Judith Hackitt DBE, HSE Chair, has said that there is broad agreement that preventing harm to the public and those at work directly affects the success and growth of a business. She also said that health and safety has become associated with too much complexity and bureaucracy, and that being smarter rather than doing more resonated with the audiences they engaged with in the planning stages of the strategy.

Part of the new strategy will seek to assist companies by sharing examples of good practice, supporting those with relevant information and advice so that there is a common understanding of what ‘proportionate health and safety looks like'.

Tackling Ill Health

In the campaign foreword, Minister for Disabled People Justin Tomlinson MP stated that some 23 million working days are lost each year due to workplace ill health, and the cost of this to individuals, employers and the state amounts to around £9 billion. Reducing workplace ill health is therefore a must for the well-being and prosperity of Britain.

This aspect of the strategy will look to boost awareness of the harm, costs and preventability of work-related will health. The HSE will bring in partners to assist with this, including the NHS, and there will be numerous awareness programmes launched.

Earlier prevention is going to be a key element of this particular theme says the HSE, because it is ‘more cost effective than trying to intervene when a person is suffering from more serious ill health'.

In Summary

In summary, it looks as though there will be a great deal more help available when it comes to managing health and safety in the workplace, and better communication as to the straightforward advice and guidance already available thanks to this new HSE strategy, and that organisations and businesses will be working more closely together to help get risk management right, and in doing so bring great advantage to boost business growth. 

Follow this link to read the full Help Britain Work Well strategy document.